Sure, the acts which have already established themselves as money makers might do well in a post-recording sales world
But it's the acts that haven't already established themselves that are going to get screwed hardest by their record labels, i.e. however many records they sell, the act won't make a dime off of it because the label will always be "covering costs". The only bargaining chip with record companies comes when you're already super-famous, and threatening to jump ship becomes an actual threat.
The number of people who want major label contract could be explained by the fact that many of those people are ignorant about the record industry. You have to recognize, at least, that many of the big name artists are fracking teenagers, and teenagers are naive. They don't know about business in general, and the record industry is particularly slick and seductive.
Google for it? It's not hard. Or, if you really feel like taking a risk, put the name of the band in your address bar and add ".com" after it. See what happens.
There really seems to be a sense of entitlement here (by record companies). They made money once upon a time with their business model, and so they expect that their old business model must necessarily be enforced by law. Now, the truth is that they still do make money, and they can continue to make money, but just not as much money with the same business model.
Anyway, people seem to forget that our population wasn't born to be disposable consumers for large corporations. We do not exist to be bullied and exploited for profit. Companies and corporations are a means to an end. They are artificial constructions so that we can organize ourselves into a society that can work efficiently to provide for ourselves. Record labels, for example, aren't entitled to money for simply creating a product; they must create a product we want, but more than that they must create a product efficiently enough that they can sustain their endeavor. Their endeavor is really our endeavor. The corporation is created and empowered by our society for the good of society, and if it fails to benefit us, if it fails to succeed in our endeavor, if it is so inefficient that they cannot sustain their own endeavor, then they've failed us. They are bad businessmen and their business has failed to provide us with what we, as a society, need.
Believe it or not, I've been accused of being a "communist" for saying things like this. Listening to some people talk, reading some people's comments, you'd think "capitalism" was a moral doctrine in which companies are the true individuals and profit is the only true good. "Morals" should be outlawed from business practices, and all should be sacrificed on the alter of short-term gains and increased stock prices.
Listen people, capitalism is just an economic theory that personal economic freedom will generally result in greater efficiency than an economy that is run by the government. What we're after here is efficiency in providing for society's needs, but the idea is that if you allow the system to provide benefit to the most efficient and productive, then you will see greater efficiency and more productivity. That's it. There's no moral component. There's still no purpose to it other than to order society efficiently.
Giving unlimited artificial monopolies to large bodies and guaranteeing inefficient business models against obsolescence is *not* capitalism. Yes, it benefits large companies, but that's not what capitalism is. It's actually a form of communism in which the "government" is supplanted by a partnership between the government and the small number of large companies that run everything. I don't know what you'd call it, but if you ask me, it's not good.
I think the real issue is that, if you're going to spend time figuring out how and where you can get "free" music, then it's a very small increase in the time invested to download a whole crapload of "free" music.
I mean, if I did my research, and let's say I pick bittorrent as my method (research is an expense of time). I spend time finding a good site to search for torrents, I reconfigure my firewall to allow the right ports. Once I'm doing it, clicking on an extra link or running an extra search doesn't cost me in any way. The big problems with the pirate scene is there's a certain barrier to entry when it comes to knowhow and setup and risk (legal risk). But once you're doing it, it's like, in for a penny, in for a pound.
iTunes is the opposite. There's a very small barrier to entry (installing iTunes), but each purchase is as expensive as the first.
Therefore, it should be obvious that the volume of piracy has no real relation to sales nor the loss of sales. People will download pirated movies, songs, and software just because it's there, just because they can, because it's free and easy. They'll download songs they don't listen to and have no real intention of listening to, except maybe once, or except maybe for the idea that they'll have it then. People hoard things.
So the download numbers probably don't really mean much, or at least don't mean what the RIAA wants them to mean.
Or it could be a different very old, and very nasty strategy. When faced with an opponent who's supposed to be admired for his integrity and restraint:
Collect all the nasty things said about you
Find one where the person making the statement is loosely connected to your opponent
Play the victim and make a big deal about how nasty the statement was
Disclose the connection to your opponent as though they're best friends
Act shocked, surprised, indignant
Profit!
Unfortunately, when something like this comes out, it can be hard to tell whether it's a result of the strategy you mentioned or the one I did.
Part of the problem with this is that the Internet has become so integrated into our society that it isn't simply some high-tech gadget for the rich. It's infrastructure.
Well, either that would have happened, or else people would have held off suing until YouTube was purchased by someone with deep pockets. Either way, it wouldn't have been so easy to wait for the smoke to clear before buying.
You're right, they are competing against "free", which is hard enough, but they've also set themselves up to compete against "better" and "more convenient". That's just bad business. And then they want us to spend outrageous amounts of our own tax dollars to punish ourselves because they're bad businessmen. Yes, there's "technically illegal but practically zero chance you'll get punished", but I think you'll find that doesn't bother most people.
However, competing against free is possible. You can beat "free" with "cheap, cool, more convenient, better". People will pay reasonable amounts of money for convenience and legitimacy.
But are record companies retarded? They're stacking a product that's over-priced, poor quality, terribly inconvenient, and likely to break, against a product that's free, better quality, more convenient, and works anywhere. If they can't come up with a better method and they can't make sufficient profits, then they are bad businessmen with an unworkable business model, and their company should go out of business.
After all, the population doesn't exist just to provide consumers for whatever products companies feel like selling, but companies exist to create an efficient means to organize ourselves to satisfy our own desires and needs. We shouldn't accept that "threatening your customers and bribing lawmakers" is an acceptable business model for businesses that simply aren't providing for our desires and needs by methods efficient enough to remain profitable.
I am obviously not asserting that it's "ok to steal". Either your argument is disingenuous or you've failed to read my post properly. I'll explain it a little further in case it's the later.
Regardless of any moral judgement on copyright infringement, the fact remains that the illegal product is a better product than the illegal product. Those who believe that it's to their benefit to download illegal copies rather than purchase them legally are absolutely correct. Even if the legal and illegal copies were each at the same price, the illegal copy would be a better product, without question. So why should anyone be surprised that people refuse to purchase sub-standard defective products when better products are available for free?
You can spend all day making yourself feel good by condemning others for their immoral behavior, but it won't change the reality of what's happening. What's happening is that people are choosing better over worse, and if record companies want to reverse that trend, they should find some way to make the legal product more appealing than free high-quality downloads.
I'm not sure what we're arguing about. Are we arguing? From your own quote:
It doesn't spell out exactly what is - or is not - fair use. It gives a partial list of factors: the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
So the boundaries of fair use are indistinct, but vaguely it means that non-commercial uses that don't threaten the market are fair. This is often used to justify things like personal backups. However, your second quote was regarding a case where someone had copies of the media without having a legitimate copy to begin with.
From a practical standpoint, WMA with DRM and AAC with DRM are as different as cassettes and CDs.
Not quite. More like PlayForSure WMA and Fairplay AAC might possibly be considered as different as BluRay and HD-DVD... or something like that. It's worse than BluRay/HD-DVD, though because at least those two formats actually require different equipment. They aren't artificially separated in order to confuse customers into buying the same DVD for the third time....
Or are they?
...no such store exists, and it's absurd to ask one store to credit your purchases at another.
Exactly my point. Consumers are correct to believe that you're better off with illegal copies, because legal copies are hopelessly screwed up by an industry that simply can't get its sh*t together.
But that's exactly what I mean by "they want to have their cake and eat it too." If you want to say they've taken a stance, then the problem is that they've taken both stances, and hop back-and-forth depending on which will serve them better. Ok, so maybe they made a legal claim with legal ramifications, but that doesn't prevent Sony from trying to hold customers to "license agreements", but only that it might not stand up in court if the customer has a good lawyer. It (according to this article) doesn't keep salespeople from telling customers that it's a license agreement. It doesn't keep agents of the various record labels from making public statements about "licenses".
I understand what you're saying, but from the linked article, it isn't clear that their is a set, well-defined legal meaning to "fair use" as you're suggesting, but rather that it is what it sounds like: fair use. That there are some instances where copying is "fair" even if it technically breaches copyright. In fact, what's made clear in the article is that "fair use" is nebulous and poorly defined, and it isn't clear what falls within it and what doesn't. It seems largely an issue of precedence, there are some lines drawn by prior court decisions, but some of the borders won't be clear until another case clarifies it.
IANAL, but I read your linked article, and I'm not sure how those business models aren't threatened. The article says that "fair use" is a vague idea, not clearly defined, but things such as "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research" fit within the scope, as does time-shifting. Also, personal copies of audio you've legitimately purchased are generally ok. And that's where these business models falter. If it's OK to copy from one device to another so long as the first copy is legit, then the record labels have a harder time selling you a new copy for every device.
The big idea here is that copyrights are granted by the government for a purpose-- to promote the arts. The government will only uphold the copyright insofar as it fits the rules of "promoting the arts", but it has exceptions that were devised for the public good. Licenses, on the other hand, are private agreements between individuals, and do not have those sorts of exceptions, and so this is why the record labels want to claim that they're selling "licenses" and not "copies of copyrighted materials".
Maybe not "forced to pirate", but they definitely sent the message that doing business with record companies in a legitimate manner means throwing money away for no return. They sent the message that, if you just want to listen to music, and you're not a computer genius, you're better off downloading illegal DRM-free copies.
The guy made a mistake (downloading WMA format music to play on an iPod) and rather than deal with it and eat his $10 losses, decided that he would rather get his music for free.
So what? Why should Joe Sixpack be expected to track the licensing differences between WMA and AAC? If I went to a record store, spent $10 on a cassette, and then went back and wanted to exchange it for a $10 credit on the same album in CD form, you'd be able to do that. (At least, you used to be able to do that) Why not the same for WMAs? If what he really purchased was the right to listen to that music, we shouldn't he be able to retrieve whatever format he likes to exercise that right?
It sounds more like the record company felt entitled to his $10 whether or not they provided him with anything of value.
I think there's truth to the idea. The problem is, the media companies won't take a stance on what you're paying for when you buy a CD. Are you buying a product, or some kind of license. They won't take a stance because they want to have their cake and eat it too.
They obviously don't want to say you've "purchased" anything, since it implies that you have some ownership. Ownership implies rights, and they don't want consumers to have any rights. On the other hand, if you've purchased a "license", then it becomes even more ambiguous. What are the terms of the license? When did I agree to it? If I'm purchasing a "license to listen" as you suppose, then what if I play my CD for a friend-- that friend has no license to listen. That friend is as much an "unlicensed listener" as if they downloaded the MP3 from the internet.
Of course, things would be made more clear if the media companies would simply agree that the issue is simply copyright, and the problem is with mass duplication and distribution. Of course, this is really only sticky because they don't seem to want to stipulate that consumers have fair-use rights or that copyrights have limits. With "licensing", they can continually charge consumers on whatever terms they wish, making the same person pay for the same media content repeatedly (i.e. once for your phone, once for your mp3 player, again when you buy a new mp3 player), but the idea of "fair use" threatens those sorts of business models.
Really? That sounds too similar to be a coincidence. Perhaps early man, in ancient times, studied caching algorithms and garbage collection algorithms and, over time, learned to apply these algorithms to their environment, thereby "sorting" them.
That's incredible, that after all these years, we've finally discovered that people think like computers!
On the other hand, this article was (supposedly) about how Vista has more to offer than a snazzy new interface. If, after the article, the reader feels compelled to ask, "so what is it that Vista is supposed to offer?" then it seems like a fair question.
(I don't have Vista, but surely there's a way to turn off Aero if it's that big a deal?)
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of Vista, but I don't get this complaint. There's a Vista theme that looks just the same but without the glass effect. If you don't like the glass effect for whatever reason, there's nothing requiring you to use it.
Well, in fairness, if you pick a topic like, "How Vista is more than a pretty face," you'd have a hard time staying on topic too. It'd be like if I set out to write a factual article titled "The Easter Bunny's trip to Mars".
Yes, in every job I've had, I try to stress that point: If you can't tell that any IT work is being done, that doesn't necessarily mean your IT staff is lazy. On the contrary, it might mean we're very good.
Along with everything else, even relatively big changes, handled properly, can be completely transparent to the users. I've had conversations (very roughly) like the following:
PHB: Things seem awfully quiet. Do you guys have things you're working on?
me: Why yes, as a matter of fact, we just replaced the e-mail server last night. Everyone is operating on a new server.
PHB {looking skeptical): Really? Hmmmm... I hadn't noticed.
me: Exactly. The guys did a great job. You shouldn't really see a difference.
PHB: Huh...? If it's no different, why did you do it then?
me:...because you would have noticed a difference if we hadn't moved it. The mail server would have stopped working within six months.
PHB (again, skeptically): Why's that? Shouldn't those things just keep... running?
It goes on, but you get the idea. Some of the best IT work is planned carefully and executed methodically, specifically so that no one can really tell the difference.
Really, I've always been surprised at the low quality of Creative's drivers. I've had many systems with very standard hardware that have been unstable when I put a Creative card in it. I've had many Creative cards that wouldn't be recognized by their own driver installation programs. (i.e. I install a SB Live!, download SB Live! drivers from the site, run the install, and it says no SB Live! is installed. I find out later it's some OEM version of the card that, in spite of having the same serial number, requires specialized drivers.)
It's just crazy to me. It's worse than either Nvidia or ATI, and I feel like sound cards can't be harder than video cards, can they?
Even though I work on the support side, and I agree that this may have flavored my viewpoint, that doesn't mean I've never had to manage someone who had deadline-based projects rather than being entirely reactive to trouble-calls.
Also, I know plenty of people who think all meetings are stupid, but it can be very important for working on projects that require people work as teams. I guess it's possible that your work might be entirely isolated and require no coordination with anyone else, but most of us have to work with others somewhere along the line, and I've seen what happens when we don't have regular meetings.
The results are hard to quantify, but they're noticeable. Getting everyone together in a room, face to face, and hearing each other describe their status/progress-- it ends up raising issues that otherwise go unnoticed. If we don't have meetings, someone ends up going off and solving things "in their own way," which inevitably causes problems for someone else's portion of the project. Or, they just chug away for a while working on a solution that someone else on the team already knew wouldn't work. It ends up being a big waste of time to *not* have meetings.
IM/email/phone aren't really good substitutes. First, you can learn a lot from people's faces and voices. When one of your workers asserts a deadline, for example, it helps to be able to ask your questions right then, and be able to gauge his confidence in the deadline by his face and voice. Also, even being on the phone, people tend to do other work at the same time. They read things, go on IM, etc., and you don't get their full attention. Finally, if you actually need teamwork, it just helps to get everyone in a room and make sure everyone is getting along.
I think you're just looking at the wrong layer of "work". You're just thinking, "I can get my work done without any rules, and so that must be good enough!" Sometimes that just isn't good enough, because your manager might be looking for more than that. If your work isn't isolated, sometimes you actually have to work with other people, and work on common ground, in order to get things done properly, efficiently, and predictably.
There was an article on/. a while back which said, basically, that workers are more productive when they feel that their work matters. Sure, sure, there are other factors, but apparently this factor has been highly underestimated. It's not always enough to know that you're being compensated through pay or other means. Appreciation (i.e. saying, "thanks, you did a good job") only goes so far. But if people really believe that there would be a big problem, or that people would suffer, if their job were not done properly, they're more likely to come through, they'll work harder, and they'll do a better job.
At least, that's a hybrid of the article and my own experience. I know I feel it sometimes. I realize sometimes that, at the end of the day, I've just shuffled some bits around, flipped 1s to 0s and vice versa. I've spent a lot of time making backups that are just going to be overwritten when no disaster occurs. The benefit of good IT work can be hard to quantify, since a lot of it is preventative (i.e. "no change" is a good result) and a lot it is only contingent (i.e. you only see it when something goes wrong). And to top it off, if you do a good job with the preventative side, things are less likely to go wrong, and you'll be less likely to see a payoff from your work on various contingencies.
So I guess I'm saying that, if you're a manager, try to keep in mind that you're employees might have a hard time with job satisfaction.
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Sure, the acts which have already established themselves as money makers might do well in a post-recording sales world
But it's the acts that haven't already established themselves that are going to get screwed hardest by their record labels, i.e. however many records they sell, the act won't make a dime off of it because the label will always be "covering costs". The only bargaining chip with record companies comes when you're already super-famous, and threatening to jump ship becomes an actual threat.
The number of people who want major label contract could be explained by the fact that many of those people are ignorant about the record industry. You have to recognize, at least, that many of the big name artists are fracking teenagers, and teenagers are naive. They don't know about business in general, and the record industry is particularly slick and seductive.
Google for it? It's not hard. Or, if you really feel like taking a risk, put the name of the band in your address bar and add ".com" after it. See what happens.
There really seems to be a sense of entitlement here (by record companies). They made money once upon a time with their business model, and so they expect that their old business model must necessarily be enforced by law. Now, the truth is that they still do make money, and they can continue to make money, but just not as much money with the same business model.
Anyway, people seem to forget that our population wasn't born to be disposable consumers for large corporations. We do not exist to be bullied and exploited for profit. Companies and corporations are a means to an end. They are artificial constructions so that we can organize ourselves into a society that can work efficiently to provide for ourselves. Record labels, for example, aren't entitled to money for simply creating a product; they must create a product we want, but more than that they must create a product efficiently enough that they can sustain their endeavor. Their endeavor is really our endeavor. The corporation is created and empowered by our society for the good of society, and if it fails to benefit us, if it fails to succeed in our endeavor, if it is so inefficient that they cannot sustain their own endeavor, then they've failed us. They are bad businessmen and their business has failed to provide us with what we, as a society, need.
Believe it or not, I've been accused of being a "communist" for saying things like this. Listening to some people talk, reading some people's comments, you'd think "capitalism" was a moral doctrine in which companies are the true individuals and profit is the only true good. "Morals" should be outlawed from business practices, and all should be sacrificed on the alter of short-term gains and increased stock prices.
Listen people, capitalism is just an economic theory that personal economic freedom will generally result in greater efficiency than an economy that is run by the government. What we're after here is efficiency in providing for society's needs, but the idea is that if you allow the system to provide benefit to the most efficient and productive, then you will see greater efficiency and more productivity. That's it. There's no moral component. There's still no purpose to it other than to order society efficiently.
Giving unlimited artificial monopolies to large bodies and guaranteeing inefficient business models against obsolescence is *not* capitalism. Yes, it benefits large companies, but that's not what capitalism is. It's actually a form of communism in which the "government" is supplanted by a partnership between the government and the small number of large companies that run everything. I don't know what you'd call it, but if you ask me, it's not good.
I think the real issue is that, if you're going to spend time figuring out how and where you can get "free" music, then it's a very small increase in the time invested to download a whole crapload of "free" music.
I mean, if I did my research, and let's say I pick bittorrent as my method (research is an expense of time). I spend time finding a good site to search for torrents, I reconfigure my firewall to allow the right ports. Once I'm doing it, clicking on an extra link or running an extra search doesn't cost me in any way. The big problems with the pirate scene is there's a certain barrier to entry when it comes to knowhow and setup and risk (legal risk). But once you're doing it, it's like, in for a penny, in for a pound.
iTunes is the opposite. There's a very small barrier to entry (installing iTunes), but each purchase is as expensive as the first.
Therefore, it should be obvious that the volume of piracy has no real relation to sales nor the loss of sales. People will download pirated movies, songs, and software just because it's there, just because they can, because it's free and easy. They'll download songs they don't listen to and have no real intention of listening to, except maybe once, or except maybe for the idea that they'll have it then. People hoard things.
So the download numbers probably don't really mean much, or at least don't mean what the RIAA wants them to mean.
Unfortunately, when something like this comes out, it can be hard to tell whether it's a result of the strategy you mentioned or the one I did.
Part of the problem with this is that the Internet has become so integrated into our society that it isn't simply some high-tech gadget for the rich. It's infrastructure.
Well, either that would have happened, or else people would have held off suing until YouTube was purchased by someone with deep pockets. Either way, it wouldn't have been so easy to wait for the smoke to clear before buying.
You're right, they are competing against "free", which is hard enough, but they've also set themselves up to compete against "better" and "more convenient". That's just bad business. And then they want us to spend outrageous amounts of our own tax dollars to punish ourselves because they're bad businessmen. Yes, there's "technically illegal but practically zero chance you'll get punished", but I think you'll find that doesn't bother most people.
However, competing against free is possible. You can beat "free" with "cheap, cool, more convenient, better". People will pay reasonable amounts of money for convenience and legitimacy.
But are record companies retarded? They're stacking a product that's over-priced, poor quality, terribly inconvenient, and likely to break, against a product that's free, better quality, more convenient, and works anywhere. If they can't come up with a better method and they can't make sufficient profits, then they are bad businessmen with an unworkable business model, and their company should go out of business.
After all, the population doesn't exist just to provide consumers for whatever products companies feel like selling, but companies exist to create an efficient means to organize ourselves to satisfy our own desires and needs. We shouldn't accept that "threatening your customers and bribing lawmakers" is an acceptable business model for businesses that simply aren't providing for our desires and needs by methods efficient enough to remain profitable.
I am obviously not asserting that it's "ok to steal". Either your argument is disingenuous or you've failed to read my post properly. I'll explain it a little further in case it's the later.
Regardless of any moral judgement on copyright infringement, the fact remains that the illegal product is a better product than the illegal product. Those who believe that it's to their benefit to download illegal copies rather than purchase them legally are absolutely correct. Even if the legal and illegal copies were each at the same price, the illegal copy would be a better product, without question. So why should anyone be surprised that people refuse to purchase sub-standard defective products when better products are available for free?
You can spend all day making yourself feel good by condemning others for their immoral behavior, but it won't change the reality of what's happening. What's happening is that people are choosing better over worse, and if record companies want to reverse that trend, they should find some way to make the legal product more appealing than free high-quality downloads.
I'm not sure what we're arguing about. Are we arguing? From your own quote:
So the boundaries of fair use are indistinct, but vaguely it means that non-commercial uses that don't threaten the market are fair. This is often used to justify things like personal backups. However, your second quote was regarding a case where someone had copies of the media without having a legitimate copy to begin with.
From a practical standpoint, WMA with DRM and AAC with DRM are as different as cassettes and CDs.
Not quite. More like PlayForSure WMA and Fairplay AAC might possibly be considered as different as BluRay and HD-DVD... or something like that. It's worse than BluRay/HD-DVD, though because at least those two formats actually require different equipment. They aren't artificially separated in order to confuse customers into buying the same DVD for the third time....
Or are they?
Exactly my point. Consumers are correct to believe that you're better off with illegal copies, because legal copies are hopelessly screwed up by an industry that simply can't get its sh*t together.
But that's exactly what I mean by "they want to have their cake and eat it too." If you want to say they've taken a stance, then the problem is that they've taken both stances, and hop back-and-forth depending on which will serve them better. Ok, so maybe they made a legal claim with legal ramifications, but that doesn't prevent Sony from trying to hold customers to "license agreements", but only that it might not stand up in court if the customer has a good lawyer. It (according to this article) doesn't keep salespeople from telling customers that it's a license agreement. It doesn't keep agents of the various record labels from making public statements about "licenses".
I understand what you're saying, but from the linked article, it isn't clear that their is a set, well-defined legal meaning to "fair use" as you're suggesting, but rather that it is what it sounds like: fair use. That there are some instances where copying is "fair" even if it technically breaches copyright. In fact, what's made clear in the article is that "fair use" is nebulous and poorly defined, and it isn't clear what falls within it and what doesn't. It seems largely an issue of precedence, there are some lines drawn by prior court decisions, but some of the borders won't be clear until another case clarifies it.
IANAL, but I read your linked article, and I'm not sure how those business models aren't threatened. The article says that "fair use" is a vague idea, not clearly defined, but things such as "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research" fit within the scope, as does time-shifting. Also, personal copies of audio you've legitimately purchased are generally ok. And that's where these business models falter. If it's OK to copy from one device to another so long as the first copy is legit, then the record labels have a harder time selling you a new copy for every device.
The big idea here is that copyrights are granted by the government for a purpose-- to promote the arts. The government will only uphold the copyright insofar as it fits the rules of "promoting the arts", but it has exceptions that were devised for the public good. Licenses, on the other hand, are private agreements between individuals, and do not have those sorts of exceptions, and so this is why the record labels want to claim that they're selling "licenses" and not "copies of copyrighted materials".
Maybe not "forced to pirate", but they definitely sent the message that doing business with record companies in a legitimate manner means throwing money away for no return. They sent the message that, if you just want to listen to music, and you're not a computer genius, you're better off downloading illegal DRM-free copies.
So what? Why should Joe Sixpack be expected to track the licensing differences between WMA and AAC? If I went to a record store, spent $10 on a cassette, and then went back and wanted to exchange it for a $10 credit on the same album in CD form, you'd be able to do that. (At least, you used to be able to do that) Why not the same for WMAs? If what he really purchased was the right to listen to that music, we shouldn't he be able to retrieve whatever format he likes to exercise that right?
It sounds more like the record company felt entitled to his $10 whether or not they provided him with anything of value.
I think there's truth to the idea. The problem is, the media companies won't take a stance on what you're paying for when you buy a CD. Are you buying a product, or some kind of license. They won't take a stance because they want to have their cake and eat it too.
They obviously don't want to say you've "purchased" anything, since it implies that you have some ownership. Ownership implies rights, and they don't want consumers to have any rights. On the other hand, if you've purchased a "license", then it becomes even more ambiguous. What are the terms of the license? When did I agree to it? If I'm purchasing a "license to listen" as you suppose, then what if I play my CD for a friend-- that friend has no license to listen. That friend is as much an "unlicensed listener" as if they downloaded the MP3 from the internet.
Of course, things would be made more clear if the media companies would simply agree that the issue is simply copyright, and the problem is with mass duplication and distribution. Of course, this is really only sticky because they don't seem to want to stipulate that consumers have fair-use rights or that copyrights have limits. With "licensing", they can continually charge consumers on whatever terms they wish, making the same person pay for the same media content repeatedly (i.e. once for your phone, once for your mp3 player, again when you buy a new mp3 player), but the idea of "fair use" threatens those sorts of business models.
Really? That sounds too similar to be a coincidence. Perhaps early man, in ancient times, studied caching algorithms and garbage collection algorithms and, over time, learned to apply these algorithms to their environment, thereby "sorting" them.
That's incredible, that after all these years, we've finally discovered that people think like computers!
On the other hand, this article was (supposedly) about how Vista has more to offer than a snazzy new interface. If, after the article, the reader feels compelled to ask, "so what is it that Vista is supposed to offer?" then it seems like a fair question.
(I don't have Vista, but surely there's a way to turn off Aero if it's that big a deal?)
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of Vista, but I don't get this complaint. There's a Vista theme that looks just the same but without the glass effect. If you don't like the glass effect for whatever reason, there's nothing requiring you to use it.
Well, in fairness, if you pick a topic like, "How Vista is more than a pretty face," you'd have a hard time staying on topic too. It'd be like if I set out to write a factual article titled "The Easter Bunny's trip to Mars".
Yes, in every job I've had, I try to stress that point: If you can't tell that any IT work is being done, that doesn't necessarily mean your IT staff is lazy. On the contrary, it might mean we're very good.
Along with everything else, even relatively big changes, handled properly, can be completely transparent to the users. I've had conversations (very roughly) like the following:
It goes on, but you get the idea. Some of the best IT work is planned carefully and executed methodically, specifically so that no one can really tell the difference.
Really, I've always been surprised at the low quality of Creative's drivers. I've had many systems with very standard hardware that have been unstable when I put a Creative card in it. I've had many Creative cards that wouldn't be recognized by their own driver installation programs. (i.e. I install a SB Live!, download SB Live! drivers from the site, run the install, and it says no SB Live! is installed. I find out later it's some OEM version of the card that, in spite of having the same serial number, requires specialized drivers.)
It's just crazy to me. It's worse than either Nvidia or ATI, and I feel like sound cards can't be harder than video cards, can they?
Even though I work on the support side, and I agree that this may have flavored my viewpoint, that doesn't mean I've never had to manage someone who had deadline-based projects rather than being entirely reactive to trouble-calls.
Also, I know plenty of people who think all meetings are stupid, but it can be very important for working on projects that require people work as teams. I guess it's possible that your work might be entirely isolated and require no coordination with anyone else, but most of us have to work with others somewhere along the line, and I've seen what happens when we don't have regular meetings.
The results are hard to quantify, but they're noticeable. Getting everyone together in a room, face to face, and hearing each other describe their status/progress-- it ends up raising issues that otherwise go unnoticed. If we don't have meetings, someone ends up going off and solving things "in their own way," which inevitably causes problems for someone else's portion of the project. Or, they just chug away for a while working on a solution that someone else on the team already knew wouldn't work. It ends up being a big waste of time to *not* have meetings.
IM/email/phone aren't really good substitutes. First, you can learn a lot from people's faces and voices. When one of your workers asserts a deadline, for example, it helps to be able to ask your questions right then, and be able to gauge his confidence in the deadline by his face and voice. Also, even being on the phone, people tend to do other work at the same time. They read things, go on IM, etc., and you don't get their full attention. Finally, if you actually need teamwork, it just helps to get everyone in a room and make sure everyone is getting along.
I think you're just looking at the wrong layer of "work". You're just thinking, "I can get my work done without any rules, and so that must be good enough!" Sometimes that just isn't good enough, because your manager might be looking for more than that. If your work isn't isolated, sometimes you actually have to work with other people, and work on common ground, in order to get things done properly, efficiently, and predictably.
There was an article on /. a while back which said, basically, that workers are more productive when they feel that their work matters. Sure, sure, there are other factors, but apparently this factor has been highly underestimated. It's not always enough to know that you're being compensated through pay or other means. Appreciation (i.e. saying, "thanks, you did a good job") only goes so far. But if people really believe that there would be a big problem, or that people would suffer, if their job were not done properly, they're more likely to come through, they'll work harder, and they'll do a better job.
At least, that's a hybrid of the article and my own experience. I know I feel it sometimes. I realize sometimes that, at the end of the day, I've just shuffled some bits around, flipped 1s to 0s and vice versa. I've spent a lot of time making backups that are just going to be overwritten when no disaster occurs. The benefit of good IT work can be hard to quantify, since a lot of it is preventative (i.e. "no change" is a good result) and a lot it is only contingent (i.e. you only see it when something goes wrong). And to top it off, if you do a good job with the preventative side, things are less likely to go wrong, and you'll be less likely to see a payoff from your work on various contingencies.
So I guess I'm saying that, if you're a manager, try to keep in mind that you're employees might have a hard time with job satisfaction.